“Young people like to play, so if you can make the material they’re trying to learn more kinesthetic, it helps it to stick a bit better. It’s a way to transform the classroom into a living, breathing art, so that it becomes a part of them, as opposed to material that they’re supposed to absorb and spit back out.”

If you know much about Orton, it won’t surprise you that “before its West End debut in 1966, [his] play fell foul of the lord chamberlain, who removed scenes that hinted at homosexuality and mocked the church and police.” The original version of the piece premieres next week in London to mark the 50th anniversary of Orton’s murder by his lover.

Noah Charney, co-editor of the Journal of Art Crime, fills us in on the tombaroli (Italian tomb looters who emerged in the 1970s), how they get their looted antiquities onto the market (the story has a villain named Medici), and how museums do (or don’t) check the objects’ provenance.

“William Griswold, the museum’s ebullient and well-liked director and president since August, 2014, says his goal is to engage a larger and more diverse audience. And he sees no reason why the museum can’t achieve annual attendance of 1 million – a sizable increase over the average of 650,000 over the past three years, and the 707,000 visitors the museum drew in 2015-16, which included its centennial year.” Griswold tells Steven Litt how he plans to do it.

“While the hope for new finds continues unabated, one known text eludes all who seek it. In the summer of 1962, Plath began work on her second novel. We know what it was about—a fictionalized autobiography in the vein of The Bell Jar about an artist who discovers her husband has cheated—and we know that she completed a number of pages of the book before her death. But in the years that followed, the manuscript for Double Exposure vanished.”

Long after Bronco, Hardin got in trouble with the I.R.S., and then, “while living in Prescott, Ariz., he formed an anti-tax, anti-government protest group that evolved into the Arizona Patriots militia movement, which was accused in 1986 of planning to blow up an I.R.S. complex in Utah.”

In Dunkirk, Nicolas Idasiak “spends 90 minutes daily showing visitors around town in a tour based on the Hollywood hit. The walk stops every few minutes along the beach and outside nondescript houses — spots where the movie was filmed.”

Drone infrastructure update, ahoy: “In this new filing, the company provides a thumbnail sketch of how its system works right now: products are manufactured, brought to a fulfillment facility, from which they’re dispatched to a customer.” Yes, drones are going to buzz back and forth from moving vehicles … or at least that’s one plan.

Basically, the nominators made a rookie movie for the show This Is Us, and they submitted an episode that takes place more in the past than in the present. (In a peculiarly appropriate move, House of Cards will take its place.)

The movie collapsed in a wider release. But why? After all, Zero Dark Thirty was just as bleak if not bleaker, and that movie did just fine in wider release. Here are a few reasons this movie fell off the face of the moviegoing earth.

Right place, right time: “When he set out to make Icarus, the playwright and actor Bryan Fogel had one goal: to examine how easy it is to get away with doping in professional sport. … What actually happened was a bit like tugging on an errant thread and having the entire clothing industry unravel right on top of you.”

Love emoji, thumbs-up emoji: “Her new mobile selfies are by turns outlandish, hilarious and poignant. They demystify the influences and experiments of a great artist, even as they also point to the gap between Ms. Sherman’s vital, unsettling practice of sideways self-portraiture and the narcissistic practice of selfie snapping.”

The woman was not taking the suggestion – which is against V&A policy – lightly. “Instead of bearing that in silence, she busted out her phone and started tweeting. She ribbed the V&A, pointing out that the museum seemed totally fine with some bare bosoms — as long as they were made of stone instead of flesh.”

More From Ystad: Bobby MedinaAt the Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival, the American trumpeter Bobby Medina led a band in a program that drew on his bebop credentials and his Latin American heritage. Claus Sörenson’s XL Big …read moreAJBlog: RiffTidesPublished 2017-08-05

Home, Where the Heart IsKyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion at Jacob’s Pillow, August 2 through 6 Jeremy “Jae” Neal (L) and Tamisha Guy in Kyle Abraham’sDearest Home. Photo: Brooke Trisolini Kyle Abraham has always treated his own life and times as …read moreAJBlog: DancebeatPublished 2017-08-05

The problem is way larger than any high-level Googler’s anonymous anti-equity rant. “The kind of computing systems that get made and used by people outside the industry, and with serious consequences, are a direct byproduct of the gross machismo of computing writ large. More women and minorities are needed in computing because the world would be better for their contributions—and because it might be much worse without them.”

John Yau: “It is not that I was dissatisfied more than usual with what I had written. Writers are always vexed by what they have written. In this case, something else about the works wouldn’t leave me alone. The impetus came from pieces that I did and didn’t write about. I decided to go back to the exhibition and look again. I wanted to figure out what I had not gotten to the first time, and which could not wait.”

In retrospect, they were city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets, in thrall to cars. A mass of contradictions, Wright, the inexhaustible genius, was, in these as in so many other projects, a maker and mirror of the American century. His archives should keep scholars busy for at least the rest of the post-American one.

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